Solar power game-changer: 'Near perfect' absorption of sunlight, from all angles - <AUTHOR> http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/11/03/solar.power.game.changer.near.perfect.absorption.sunlight.all.angles

<comment><USER2> The writer doesn't seem to be aware of the notion of flux when he/she writes that this innovation will make sun-tracking obsolete. Basic trigonometry shows you that, even if the panel absorbs all of the radiation that it intercepts at a high angle, at higher angles the panel intercepts less radiation.

The cosine function is a wonderful thing, and 100% of nothing is still... <mumble>carry the four, divide by seven, minus pi</mumble>... nothing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Black paint does this too. Absorption is not the goal of a solar panel. It's a shame they don't say anything about conversion. I suspect if it helped with that, there would have been numbers to support it.

</comment><comment><USER4> "...would absorb 96.21 percent of sunlight no matter the position of the sun in the sky..."

I'm pretty sure that's impossible, and a violation of physics. Maybe it's better than other coatings, but I'm pretty sure it's not the same 96.21 from every angle.

</comment><comment><USER5> Solyndra is producing a cylindrical shaped solar panel which is capable of capturing light from more directions:

<http://www.solyndra.com/Products/Optimized-PV>

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems too sensationalist to be plausible...

<comment><USER7> Yep. Getting tired of the cycle. Every 3-6 months since 98 or so (when I started reading slashdot) there's a "major discovery that will revolutionize solar power!". The article spends three lines on a few pseudo-scientific generalizations and the rest gushing about how power generation companies' days are numbered.

Its been a _decade_. Photo-voltaic solar still sucks just as much as it did before the turn of the century. I'm tired of hearing about anti-glare coatings, stupid mirror tricks, splitting water to get hydrogen with your solar power, etc. Sticking a plain old solar cell in your rube-goldberg is _not_ a breakthrough. Call me when we get _drastically_ more efficient silicon wafers. You can keep your mirrors.

Sorry for the rant y'all.

<comment><USER8> _Call me when we get drastically more efficient silicon wafers_

Not gonna happen: we're already at 30%, and don't have room for a "drastic" increase.

I'm far more interested in a drastic reduction in cost.

<comment><USER9> And durability. Deserts would be perfect for solar power, were it not for sandstorms...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


FORTRAN subroutine for rotation of three-dimensional line figures (1970) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19700023358.pdf

<comment><USER2> It's nice to see a Fortran code this old factored and presented properly as a subroutine! Other legacy Fotran codes are not very modular (at least this has been my experience).

<comment><USER3> The NAG Numerical Algorithm Group's FORTAN routines where fairly good and its direct descendant is still avaible.

[http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/fl/FLdescription.asp](http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/fl/FLdescription.asp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An example of really bad use of statement labels - the convention I was taught was to use 7000 and 8000 for input and output (format statements) and to use 6000 for goto's

Start at 6000 and go up in increments of 10 or 100 and to use 6999 for the last label in a routine.

so when you wanted to exist a subroutine or function you would use GOTO 6999.

<comment><USER4> I'm not so sure about the "really bad"... I started programming in Fortran in 1973 and have never come across that convention before. Never seen any code that uses it, either, come to that ;-)

<comment><USER3> It was what I was taught when I worked at a top level Rnd company based on campus at CIT.

And we also used it at BT where Fortran 77 was used in one of the Billing systems.

It might be a more UK thing</comment></comment></comment>


Western Digital's SMR disks won't work for ZFS, but they're okay for most NASes - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/ <comment><USER2> Current title is "Western Digital's SMR disks won't work for ZFS, but they're okay for most NASes." That isn't the title of the article (it's the subtitle) and doesn't match the conclusion:

> Conclusions

> We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate's Greg Belloni, who stated > on the company's behalf that they "do not recommend SMR for NAS > applications." At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in > comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so > badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware.

That's definitely not saying it's "okay for most NASes." Could we get a rename? It looks like Ars Technica themselves might be going back and forth; the current URL contains the slug, "western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great- but-theyre-not-garbage," indicating that may have been the old title.

<comment><USER3> Ars Technica publishes every article with two titles; there's an A/B test in the first few minutes after an article is published, after which the one with better click-through rate becomes the permanent title. Obviously only one of the two titles can be the slug, so often the slug reflects the title that has lost. That does not indicate going back and forth.

Source: it's a well-known fact that editors have disclosed many times over. Also, as a subscriber I often see a different title in my RSS feed.

<comment><USER4> Here's a more detailed discussion from Ars on their A/B testing of headlines that I found:

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/10/tfw-a...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/10/tfw-an-obituary-you-wrote-five-years-ago-goes- viral/?comments=1&post=32066759)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I built a 2 drive 4TB RAID1 with a DS220j using these SMR drives the other day.

To be honest performance is as I'd expect out of a hard drive. But I've mostly been using SSDs on my PCs.

I've put my instrument VSTs on it and I'm using the Windows NFS client (you use cli command to mount after enabling in add windows features)

Standard windows file sharing (SMB) seems to top out at 25MB/s and I've no idea why.

I'm not too worried about it being SMR at least looking at my use case.

But it's really messed up that WD hid the technology used.

If anything it would drive sales for their more expensive products.

Also it does highlight that in a lot of tech product fields we don't have good reviews. Because there's no money in it.

Like with laptops there's notebookcheck doing technical reviews.

With displays rtings and tftcentral.

But with other less used stuff it's a YouTube video from someone saying "yeah it's a harddrive" and reading the marketing.

Or a drive will get reviewed. Then the manufacture will start selling something with the same brand but different model number to confuse customers.

But nobody will re-review, partially because they weren't told.

<comment><USER6> If you just built your array, you wouldn't encounter this issue yet. The problem would come (assuming you're using ZFS) when your NAS is full of data and one of your disks fails, and you try to replace it with another SMR drive. The drive would be rejected before it could be added to the array.

<comment><USER7> As benchmarked in the article, SMR drives rebuild Linux RAID fine because it's just a sequential data overwrite.

The problem occurs when you are dealing with sequential files with small sector sizes, and non-sequential files, where performance is abysmal: 93% slower than CMR as benchmarked by servethehome and Ars.

<comment><USER8> The problem is not just the slow performance, but the fact that these drives can be dropped from the array when rebuilding - RAID implementations including the one in ZFS treat abysmal performance as damage and route around it. The performance problem could be addressed simply by raising the number of drives in the array (RAID5 to RAID6 or more).

<comment><USER9> Isn't that a problem of ZFS? I don't mind SMR HDD if it was labeled as such and warn about it's weird performance traits.

<comment><USER6> This whole issue was originally that Western Digital was trying to hide which HDDs were SMR. ZFS can't be changed to have special behaviour for SMR drives if the vendors try to hide the fact they are SMR, even from software. It wouldn't be able to identify them.

<comment><USER9> Well, that's bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > the WD Red's firmware was up to the challenge of handling a conventional > RAID rebuild, which amounts to an enormous, very _large block sequential > write test_. (...) the Red is _only 16.7 percent slower_ than its non-SMR > Ironwolf competition

> we can model an ideal ZFS resilvering workload with a _massive sequential > write_ — and we did exactly that, using 32KiB blocks of incompressible > pseudorandom data (...) With this test workload, we achieved a throughput of > 209.3MiB/sec on the Ironwolf, but only 13.2MiB/sec on the Red — a 15.9:1 > slowdown

So if I understood correctly "very large block sequential write test" is only 16% slower, but reducing the size of the written block to 32KiB, like apparently ZFS does, it becomes 16 times slower?

Couldn't that be fixed in ZFS? 32 KiB block is too small for SSDs too, if I understand correctly. (Edit: I refer to: [https://tytso.livejournal.com/2009/02/20/](https://tytso.livejournal.com/2009/02/20/) "However, with SSD's (...) you need to align partitions on at least 128k boundaries for maximum efficiency." \-- it seems that 128K was an important number?).

If the writes are sequential, some kind of caching (i.e., blocking the sequential writes) could be made to avoid the slowdown? How big were the blocks written when the 16% slowdown happened?

And what is the minimal needed block size to avoid many-times slowdown?

<comment><USER7> You can change the block size with ZFS easily, it is a supported function:

        sudo zfs set recordsize=[size] data/media/series

This can be done at any time, but will only apply to new files.

ZFS is a Copy on Write system, which means that if you take a snapshot (or duplicate) a file and modify one byte, the modifications (min size of a record size) is created then (so 128KiB default). Each block is then distributed reduced to about ~32KiB of writes because of striping, parity, etc.

If you made the record size something large, let's say 1MB, then it would mean that changing 1 byte of a duplicated or snapshotted 1GB file would cause an additional 1MB of storage. Very, very very inefficient. However, still better than a non-CoW system, where duplicates and snapshots would occupy an additional 1GB irrespective of modifications.

So to summarize, ZFS is intentionally designed and benefits from small block sizes, and rather than changing it, you should simply buy a non-SMR drive esp. because they are available at comparable prices.

Also keep in mind that an advanced format HDD sector is 4096 bytes. I haven't heard of any drives with more than ~4096 bytes per sector. So as long as your block size is an integer multiple of 4096 bytes, you are getting all the benefits of your HDD medium.

I believe SSD native sectors are similar, so again, there's not reason to go for huge sectors. SMR's abysmal performance with small sectors is a _defect_ , something you should RMA the moment you receive a SMR drive (WD is honoring replacements, just mention the magic word of 'ZFS rebuild' to support).

<comment><USER11> > Also keep in mind that an advanced format HDD sector is 4096 bytes. I > haven't heard of any drives with more than ~4096 bytes per sector.

There are some NVMEs which are 8192. Not sure which, because, we haven't learned a damn thing in ~15 years.

I distinctly remember back in the 2000s Adaptec giving Theo at OpenBSD a run- around about driver code because they had lawyers in their ear trying to convince them that they should be patent and licensing trolls rather than hardware vendors (worked great for Lucent) and finally, in retaliation, he shipped a version of OpenBSD without Adaptec RAID support.

[https://openzfs.org/wiki/Performance_tuning#Alignment_Shift_...](https://openzfs.org/wiki/Performance_tuning#Alignment_Shift_.28ashift.29)

Why is this relevant? Because some of these NVME drives report wrong values for their sector size, so we're still in that same boat of being flat out lied to by the people we buy this hardware from.

Some NVME SSDs, per testing, report 4096 when they're actually 8192. So you don't know what value to use until you set up a pool/dataset, test it for performance, and then if the performance seems off versus say... Anandtech benchmarks, destroy the pool/dataset and try the other value (this becomes ashift=12 or ashift=13 currently).

You can find discussion on the ZFS subreddit about this pretty commonly, and also on the PostGIS and OpenStreetMap user groups and github issue forums since those people tend to be on the bleeding edge of the disk performance market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh my god. No wonder they lied about what technology was in those drives. If customers knew they would never buy it, regardless of price. They should have wrote it off.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nobody is saying that you can't use an SMR drive in a RAID with the appropriate write strategy. It's just that you'd expect those tweaks to be enabled when the drive actually reports itself as an SMR drive. Which these drives don't do, because WD tried to defraud their customers by doing a gross cost+feature reduction on a product line that had been shipping for many years.

<comment><USER14> Until WD published a worse case write timeout on these drives, and gets it merged into linux/etc I would claim they aren't fit for any purpose because your just crossing your fingers and hoping your write pattern is ok.

They are still hiding fundamental parameters needed to make these drives work properly (number/size of SMR regions, how much CMR is available, and ways to read the percentage the cache+CMR is full at any given time).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know the size of the non-SMR data area on the disk? I assume that's the size of a sequential write before the performance drops to a halt while writing all that to SMR. Also, random writes would perform much worse if they require multiple SMR blocks to be read and rewritten each time the non- SMR area fills up.

Perhaps a good analog for an SMR drive would be some of the early hierarchical storage servers that served data from RAM, then from spinning metal, and then from either tape or optical disks, each being slower than the previous. You could get fast writes until the RAM was full, then slower, disk-like writes while the HDs were getting filled, then excruciatingly slow throughput when you needed to hit the MO drives with little RAM or disk storage to help you.

<comment><USER15> It's not like the disk is divided into SMR and non-SMR zones. Adjacent tracks that already contain data must always be re-written. So, these driveswork well if managed in one of two ways:

* Append-only * Only use every other track

If used like that, they can be considered just another hard drive, with an unusually large gap between tracks.

But if you try to pack on as much data as the drive will hold, and then modify parts in the middle, the drive is going to have a bad time.

<comment><USER16> The drive firmware and layout are more sophisticated than you're imagining: All SMR drives have some non-SMR (CMR) zones for buffering and metadata. For the archival drives I was looking at a while ago (host-managed), it was usually 1% or 0.5% of the total. I would imagine these stealth-drive-managed ones have even more, maybe a few percent, to allow more buffering and hide the cost of shuffling data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe this is mentioned somewhere in the article, I haven't read the whole thing, but its important to elaborate: SMR is only in-place on WD Red drives between 2TB-6TB [1]. Everything smaller and larger than that uses CMR, and SMR isn't used on any other 3.5" drives beyond their budget "blue" drives. This is now cross-elaborated on their Amazon (US) istings; their 2TB-6TB Red drives are in a totally different product listing [2] which says "SMR" in the title (versus their CMR drives [3])

I don't like that they hid it. If they want to keep SMR around for their 2-6TB Red variants, I think they should reclassify those drives with another "color" and not certify them for server applications (WD Pink?)

[1] [https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas- drives/](https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-Internal-Hard- Drive/dp/B07MYL...](https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-Internal-Hard- Drive/dp/B07MYL7KVK)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/Red-12TB-Internal-Hard- Drive/dp/B07RQ...](https://www.amazon.com/Red-12TB-Internal-Hard- Drive/dp/B07RQ99XJH)

<comment><USER18> What I don't understand is: SMR is for increased density, no? So, why don't the 8 TB Reds use it?

<comment><USER19> To take a guess, I'd say they managed to remove a platter or two to lower costs on the smaller drives (I wonder if an EFAX is physically lighter?) but couldn't get the same benefit or didn't need the cost reduction in the more expensive 8TB+ drives. It's also possible that in testing, the 256MB cache just want sufficient to make DM-SMR "usable" at those larger capacities or that the firmware/controller just wasn't up to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Question about SMR drives. From my understanding, essentially at the low level they have to modify data in much larger block sizes -- so if you are modifying a small amount of data, a block has to be read in, modified, then written out. Unless the block is known to contain no data after the point where the write occurs (such as sequential writes).

What is the size of these blocks? And if the problems occur during raid rebuild, aren't the rebuilds writing data sequentially?

<comment><USER21> This all happens at the hardware level, so every block has data--every write has to write two tracks as I understand it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had two failures on a RAID 6 in the same week. All 3TB WD Red's. I'm slowly replacing all of the drives with Seagate 4TB NAS drives. I definitely do not trust these drives.

And, I had had failures of some of the drives before, but when I pulled them and did extensive tests of them, they were always OK.

<comment><USER14> I'm betting its possible if your drives are sufficiently fragmented and you start a heavy write workload that shotguns sectors all over the disk from multiple TCQs the default write command timeouts on most RAID systems aren't sufficiently long.

So the drive may not have failed, the RAID just determined that the command was taking to long, fired a reset at the drive and when it didn't immediately respond marked it bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The whole point of ZFS is to tolerate bad drives. You could run ZFS on green drives if you want. (but don't count on high performance).

</comment><comment><USER24> Except for the uberblocks (which will definitely have a problem with SMR), shouldn't SMR be fine for ZFS because it's copy-on-wirte?

</comment><comment><USER25> This article makes me wonder how much WD paid...

Since they hid the change to SMR, what else has been hidden?

<comment><USER26> Paid for what, the article? The author has been around the ZFS community for a long time and helps tons of people (including me) for free. He's not schilling for WD if that's what you're suggesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Now you could turn the argument around and ask if ZFS is at all appropriate for consumer/small office NAS systems.

There is an argument to be made that ZFS might be getting a bit to much hype as the future of mass market storage given how dependent it seems to be on the hardware being "perfect".

<comment><USER28> Having suffered from silent data corruption affecting some old photos that I only noticed years after it had happened (backups going back that far had already been purged), I'd argue that ZFS is appropriate for everyone who cares about their data.

Given that ZFS will happily run on pretty much anything, I think the bar for hardware dependency is slightly lower than "perfect" and somewhere around "not completely crap".</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do your business cards look like? - <AUTHOR>

Inspired from the designer news post.<p>What do your business cards look like? Any links to pics? <comment><USER2> Business cards are obsolete.</comment>


Radioactive.js - <AUTHOR> http://rein.pk/radioactive-js/

<comment><USER2> This is one of the most virtuous pieces of software I've seen in recent years. Kudos.</comment>


To understand 2001 a Space Odyssey, you HAVE to interpret it through the Odyssey - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/2n466v/to_understand_2001_a_space_odyssey_you_have_to/ <comment><USER2> > _I don 't think anybody's said this before..._

Except the movie is literally named after The Odyssey and Kubrick himself explained why. These invented analogies are just as likely to be right as wrong.

 _Kubrick and Clarke privately referred to the project as How the Solar System Was Won, a reference to MGM 's 1962 Cinerama epic How the West Was Won. On February 23, 1965, Kubrick issued a press release announcing the title as Journey Beyond The Stars.[26] Other titles considered include Universe, Tunnel to the Stars, and Planetfall. In April 1965, eleven months after they began working on the project, Kubrick selected 2001: A Space Odyssey; Clarke said the title was "entirely" Kubrick's idea. Intending to set the film apart from the "monsters-and-sex" type of science-fiction films of the time, Kubrick used Homer's The Odyssey as inspiration for the title. Kubrick said, "It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation."_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_\(film\))

</comment><comment><USER3> To understand the movie, one only needs to read the book on which it is based. Clarke's book makes a lot of the movie (like the meaning of the apes and the ending) unambiguously clear.

I think the similarities brought up in the post are interesting but over- interpreted here. Plus, there are many other parts of the Odyssey that don't show up in 2001. The only compelling connection here is the cyclops, but without that the film can still be perfectly adequately understood.

<comment><USER4> The book was actually written concurrently - one isn't based on the other. They are both vaguely based on an earlier short story of his, Sentinel, but it doesn't really help much.

Agreed that the book clears a lot up though. I mean, I totally didn't get the monkey thing without it. For me, the book is a great story, and the film is pure eye candy. And if they could mate the two, it'd be 8 days long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> O' Brother Where Art Thou? is also loosely based on The Odyssey: [https://www.menofthewest.net/odyssey-o-brother-art- thou/](https://www.menofthewest.net/odyssey-o-brother-art-thou/)

</comment><comment><USER6> To fully appreciate the movie one needs to read Ray Kurzweil's "The singularity is near".</comment>


Five Entrepreneurial Lessons from 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikekarnj.com/blog/2010/01/03/five-entrepreneurial-lessons-from-2009/

<comment><USER2> "Again, people shouldn't make decisions based on past investments."

This works for poker, but doesn't really scale to things like a college education. I've invested two years into a B.S. in CS, took off a year, and now I'm back at it. And yes, the decision to go back is based on my past investment.

I suppose I just don't understand parts of this article. What's the point on giving advice if you just say "Always make the best decisions". Be perfect and then you'll.....be perfect?

<comment><AUTHOR> The article mentioned that your past decisions got you to the point you are today. It's about to you make decisions on where you go in the future. There's no such thing as perfection, but if you make the best decision, there's nothing really else you can do. Good luck with school again.</comment></comment>


Driving down the cost of Big-Data analytics - <AUTHOR> http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/amazon-emr-on-ec2-spot-instances.html <comment><USER2> What open-source tools are people using to build real-time big data analysis systems?

Jeff Jonas of IBM doesn't recommend batch systems such as Hadoop ([http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2011/04/the-data- is-...](http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2011/04/the-data-is-the- query.html), <http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/27/big-data/>) for real-time context accumulation systems. I have heard that IBM is making use of topological embedding algorithms to build distributed graph databases capable of real-time analysis, but very little of that research is public.

<comment><USER3> The production systems I know of are:

\- Yahoo's S4 (<http://s4.io/>).

\- Twitter nee BackType's Storm ([http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/08/storm-is-coming- more-...](http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/08/storm-is-coming-more-details- and-plans.html)).

\- Esper (<http://esper.codehaus.org/>).

While Amazon's announcement is great news for Hadoop users, I do think the future is in these real-time systems. However there isn't a clear winner yet, so it is appropriate that AWS is yet to bundle one up as an offering.

<comment><USER2> The non-open-source one I keep hearing about is Vertica (<http://www.vertica.com/resources/videos/>), which was recently acquired by HP and was founded by Mike Stonebraker (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker>), the inventor of PostgreSQL.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages - <AUTHOR> https://sheetui.com <comment><AUTHOR> So from talking to people I see a need to quickly turn a spreadsheet of information into something visually pleasing. SheetUI is my response to that need. You give it a Google Sheet URL, pick a template, and tap in the columns where you want them to show up. In return you get a visually pleasing and responsive web page that you can embed on your site, or link to in your newsletter or chat with a client.

Created with React and Material-UI, plus some spreadsheet fetching and parsing code.

Glad to answer any questions!

<comment><USER2> Why is React needed to display static HTML?

<comment><USER3> It's not?

But that being said I'm not sure this is static HTML either. You're going to need someway to parse and display that sheet data. Even if its server rendered as static HTML React isn't a bad way to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Services like this need an easy way to allow people to use their own domain names, and we need to lower the barrier of entry to individuals registering domains and setting up HTTPS.

Imagine a SaaS that sells domains, then provides and easy (and open) API for delegating control over subdomains using OAuth2.

So I sign up for sheetui, and during the registration process they redirect me to a namecheap.com (where anderspitman.net is registered) OAuth2 server, I grant them control over sheetui.anderspitman.net, and they can now host there on my behalf.

sheetui.com also shouldn't have to deal with TLS certs. Why doesn't namecheap.com handle that for me?

HTTP requests can be proxied through something like ngrok which again uses OAuth2 tokens for auth. Now we have a stack where people can securely host websites from there phone.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting use case (the delegation of subdomain). Sounds like something that can be built atop Amazon Route 53. Have you seen this need come up a lot?

<comment><USER4> I think it would be helpful for decentralizing things, ie less necessary for the web we have than the web I want.

For example I'm working on a project right now that's ideal for self-hosting, but I really want to encourage people to use their own domain names, and registering them and handling HTTPS is a rather large barrier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks really cool! I love your quick video that shows how to use the product and build a great looking UI so quickly.

I'm guessing you guys use Liquid based on the curly braces? It looks like you have a pretty nice UI for manipulating the dynamic data, but if you're interested, my product helps people write Liquid: [https://www.dropkiq.com/](https://www.dropkiq.com/)

Let me know if you're interested. Otherwise, best of luck with your product!

<comment><AUTHOR> I implemented the parsing part! This is the first I've heard of Liquid though. When SheetUI has gained sufficient traction that people need advanced Liquid support, I'll look to your product for that :) There is no price quoted on your page though; do you mind telling us here a ballpark figure?

<comment><USER5> Awesome! Yea, Liquid is a pretty robust language built by Shopify that is implemented in most languages to help with this exact problem. It might come in handy some day as you scale your app. :)

For Dropkiq, your app looks simple enough (for the Liquid part) that you could likely use our free version. For apps that have complex Liquid, we have our Pro version, which I'm currently offering beta pricing at around 1K per year.

Keep us in mind as you grow! :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it akdarrah! Thanks for letting me know about Liquid and your wonderful product!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You've done a wonderful job with explaining what it does, how, and why, all on the landing page.

<comment><USER7> The demo video is great. The only thing that could make it better is if you put the finished product in the beginning, then show how it's done.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the sort of thing that makes perfect sense in retrospect but I never thought about. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I also recently built a URL shortener on top of Sheets API ([https://github.com/ahmetb/sheets-url- shortener](https://github.com/ahmetb/sheets-url-shortener)) and I don't have to worry about setting up a database or other form of storage. All I needed to do was set up credentials, and it's good to go.

A lot of folks don't realize Google Sheets is like a free small database with a decent API. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Precisely! A lot of folks have already built their businesses and processes atop Google Sheets, so it seems a no-brainer to me that any SaaS dealing with data should have a way to bootstrap from that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great idea and execution! I've been using Liftoff[1] with Airtable as a DIY solution for this and while it's been easy to set it up and deploy it on Netlify, I still had to resort to writing a custom watch for changes daemon and forking the repo for adjusting the components layout.

I like that SheetUI has the things above built-in and more functionalities like adding buttons and a customisation UI.

Is a custom-CSS feature going to be available anytime soon? It would be great to be able to add some original styling to a website.

[1] [https://github.com/postlight/liftoff](https://github.com/postlight/liftoff)

<comment><AUTHOR> SheetUI is built using Material UI, which I'm still getting the hang of. It certainly has support for parameterized themes. As for custom CSS, I'm going to have to look into how to do that technically while making sure there's no security implications.

Thanks for showing me Liftoff! The generated websites look great. I'll see what I can learn from it.

<comment><USER9> I think just allowing a CSS textarea input that can be injected inside a <style> HTML tag is enough. If the input is HTML escaped (replace <, > and other dangerous characters) then nothing should escape out of that tag.

Thank you for considering this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In college I would make primitive webpages for my college newspaper to use for live feeds and such content publishing. I built something like this (although vastly less polished) - the writers could just fill in details in a sheet & add image URLs, and my static page could retrieve the spreadsheet contents via API and essentially have a super cheap data backend with a super fancy collaborative editor. Fun times.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is the perfect use case! Sheets already got a lot of features baked into it, no point re-inventing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to drive a restaurant website's menu using a shared Google sheet. It was an easy way for multiple people to have access to update the content. I'd cached the recent versions in-case anyone made a breaking formatting change or Google was unavailable. Worked very well for our use-case.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. I should cache the generated sites or the sheet's data in case the sheet server goes down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I guess I could put blog entries into a google sheet and publish them with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is a great use case! Let me know how it works for you. Feel free to reach out to me at tjchear over twitter/linkedin/gmail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wonderful product! I was looking to build a page on a team that I am working with, but wanted a simple integration like this. Kudos!

I would like to know if you are going to add more features later. For example, informal 'About us' pages would have links to social media in their bios. So can we have more than primary and secondary buttons?

Also, it would be lovely to have profile photo frame customizable. It looks stylish to have the photo embedded in a circular frame for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi abhayhegde, I just added more social media icon links to all of the UI components, so you can add links to social media.

Circular frame coming soon!

<comment><USER13> Thanks much! I just checked this out, it looks amazing and simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the greatest challenge will be creating enough elements/visualizations and customization to please most customers.

Our team at Sheet.Best ([https://sheet.best](https://sheet.best)) was just talking about reducing the entry barrier for our services and one of the ideas was something like this.

Nice to see more competition on the "no code" approach to use spreadsheets as databases :).

</comment><comment><USER15> Very cool! I can see this being especially useful for communicating status of some process status, like for example, # of tests run today, outcome, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never thought about this use case! I'll note this down and include it as part of the use case section :) Thanks for the idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Crazy I know: why not just link them to the sheet? If the goal is for one person to convey information to another, why do we need to "decorate" it?

I kind of like some of the Brutalism takes on web design. Just throw away all decoration and live with the ugly world, "ugly" being subjective. I think excel sheets are actually quite beautiful.

Challenge the status quo :-) at the expense of coolness, dignity and comfort.

<comment><USER17> Ugliness aside, there are some things that don't work very well in a plain spreadsheet vs a UI. For example large paragraphs and images.

Part of conveying information should be about making the information easy to digest. Sometimes a spreadsheet fits that bill. Other times a crafted UI works better.

<comment><USER16> It does if you create large cells and stick paragraphs in. Make sure the width of the cell is enough for 12-15 words. Images also work just fine. It truly boils down to "uglyness" and not functionality. "Easy to digest" is a subjective term.

Excel sheets are essentially rectangular grid with borders. Grids have been used since the 60's in graphic design, primarily championed by the Swiss Grid System (Josef-muller brockmann, et. al).

So if you say that excel sheets are not a good instrument to convey information, you're saying that a grid like structure is not good at laying out information in a logical, understandable fashion. Which is provably false - everything from Tax forms to road signs, every bit of graphic design professionally conducted uses the grid system.

Think a bit deeper than just aesthetics and ask yourself, what _exactly_ is an excel sheet? It is a bunch of boxes. Whether those are div elements or excel cells, what's the difference? Padding and margins?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with this to some extent. The aesthetics, even if it does almost nothing for functionality, unfortunately does influence people's impression and opinion, and ultimately, their decision to open their wallet. When the SaaS world is filled with players who each bring something to the table, aesthetics sometimes becomes a tie-breaker, so to speak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It'd be interesting to use this alongside the Google Sheets connector [1] for BigQuery

[1]: [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/connecting- bi...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/connecting-bigquery-and- google-sheets-to-help-with-hefty-data-analysis)

<comment><AUTHOR> I can see a need for this. I'll look into it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Might I ask what soft was used to record demo?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a Chrome extension called Screen Recorder. Very nifty! I've used it for my other projects and I'm happy with it. Only downside is it generates webm only - I had to put it through an encoder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is awesome. Congratulations, and best of luck. I played around with the product little bit and it looks really nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I hope all is well with you and your project!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI to folks who are trying it out now - on step 3, you'll have to click on an element on the preview UI so you could customize it. You can customize it to show a particular column by clicking the + button. Without customization, the resulting page will not show anything.

I'll fix this in the next iteration by providing defaults.

<comment><USER21> thanks - emailing you about my project!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Love the execution of your idea. Having played with google sheet too (using it as my storage for [https://nooze.world](https://nooze.world) actually) and having followed sheet2site story, I am left wondering if there is still money to make for services like this in 2020.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is always room for improvement! For now, SheetUI doesn't do the same thing as Sheet2Site (they generate an entire website, whereas SheetUI generates only single web page per sheet).

Considering how many people across so many industries use Google Sheets as part of their processes, I'm convinced there is some money to be made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How to use google sheets + react together: [https://www.developintelligence.com/blog/2018/08/the- simple-...](https://www.developintelligence.com/blog/2018/08/the-simple-stack- a-primer-on-using-react-google-sheets-api/)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is great, congrats on the launch! I've noticed a lot of products recently that attempt to solve this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got any examples of such products? I'd love to learn from them, and hopefully find my own niche :)

<comment><USER24> Just a few that came up on my Google search (basically, most are turning various sheets into something else!):

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902856)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21004039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21004039)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! These products are great (I can see myself using a couple of them). I think when we look across all industries that use spreadsheets, we'll find a market that's so big that any player can find their own profitable niche. I hope to find mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So why not use Awesome Table? one of the very top G Suite Marketplace apps: [https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/5608...](https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/56088344336)

<comment><USER26> Copy/Pasting my reply to the exact same comment posted elsewhere.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

From reviews:

"..you have to pay £5,400 per year!"

"Even with the nonprofit pricing it would cost $900 per year."

"Pricing for singe user with one "app" is $60 per month. The "free" version only allows 100 "views" per month. Everytime you go to the page with the app and interface with the tools it counts as a "view". Everytime you refresh the page it is another "view"."

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

</comment><comment><USER27> This product is great... But it makes me feel sad to think about all the webpages that hide a small amount of tabular data in an oversized web UI.

I want the reverse of this service - I just want the raw data from any web page in a spreadsheet ready to filter and sort and define new columns as I please...

<comment><USER28> This is one of the reasons I really like that some webpages have taken to using JSON REST endpoints to provide the data for their (usually React-based) webpage. It makes it fantastically easy to circumvent all the complicated stuff and just directly access the data.

It's somewhat of a shame that HTML never quite managed to split data from representation. It managed to separate content and styling, but the content is still treated as some kind of text document, not a textual representation of some data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like it or not, it's the reality we're in. It's not going away anytime soon, but we can always achieve incremental improvements towards that ideal through HTML standardizations. React and GraphQL (both great products from fb) really make that possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Awesome work!

I can see another variation of this being useful as well. Instead of loading live data all the time, it loads the data at time of publishing and creates a static html page with an option to auto-publish to github pages or netlify or something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh, yes. I can see how this could be something that is sorely needed. Added to my list of feature exploration!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not quite the same, but...

Turn your Google Sheets into a beautiful Gopherhole :)

[https://github.com/zenoamaro/gophersheet](https://github.com/zenoamaro/gophersheet)

A much closer transformation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh. Can you explain what a Gopherhole is?

<comment><USER31> I think a Gopherhole is to the Gopher protocol as a website is to HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Interesting approach. You know them openasapp? They also try to sit on top of a sheet to create apps

[https://www.openasapp.com/](https://www.openasapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER33> If I update the sheet, the website updates too?

<comment><AUTHOR> The sheet is retrieved client-side, so yes, you should see the new updates when you refresh the webpage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Cool idea. What's the thinking behind the 'per day' billing? I've never seen this before.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops. That was a mistake I made from copying that section from another project. Corrected it to per month now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is there a tool that does the reverse? It would also be very interesting. Turn any webpage into a spreadsheet.

<comment><USER36> Sheets itself does a remarkable job of pasting HTML into a sheet. I just tried it with English Wikipedia's list of the world's largest cities and it worked perfectly, except the column of photographs is blank instead, which is a reasonable choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wow this is just what I need for a little project I've been working on! Look forward to using it :)

<comment><USER38> You can also use Sheetsu [https://sheetsu.com](https://sheetsu.com), Glide [https://www.glideapps.com/](https://www.glideapps.com/) or Stein Expedite [https://steinhq.com](https://steinhq.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ha, does this qualify as a headless cms?

<comment><AUTHOR> Far from it! The backend is provided by Google Sheets. Much of what I do with SheetUI is to provide an easy-to-use editor and a beautiful front-end to visualize the data coming from the sheets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Anyone have a end-result demo page that I can look at?

I would like to see what it looks like.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pardon the long links, this is something I'll address in the next iteration.

Product Catalog: [https://sheetui.com/view/grid/image-tile/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT- Sin...](https://sheetui.com/view/grid/image-tile/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT- Sin3fZcKaZsiA_px22X7L6j_YV6I/2/render?pageTitle=Product%20Catalog&imgSrc=%7B%7BProduct%20Image%7D%7D&title=%7B%7BProduct%20Name%7D%7D&subtitle=%7B%7BPrice%7D%7D)

Pokemons: [https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media- card-2/1F92PX...](https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media- card-2/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT- Sin3fZcKaZsiA_px22X7L6j_YV6I/4/render?pageTitle=Pokemon&pageDesc=Collection%20of%20pokemons%20that%20I%20own!&imgSrc=%7B%7BImage%7D%7D&title=%7B%7BName%7D%7D&subtitle=%7B%7BType%7D%7D&description=%7B%7BAbilities%7D%7D&btnPrimaryCaption=More%20Info&btnPrimaryLink=%7B%7BLink%7D%7D)

Team roster: [https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media- card-2/1F92PX...](https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media- card-2/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT- Sin3fZcKaZsiA_px22X7L6j_YV6I/1/render?pageTitle=Our%20Team&pageDesc=Our%20lovely%20teammates%20from%20all%20over%20the%20country%20%E2%9D%A4%EF%B8%8F&imgSrc=%7B%7BProfile%20Image%7D%7D&title=%7B%7BFirst%20Name%7D%7D%20%7B%7BLast%20Name%7D%7D&subtitle=%7B%7BOccupation%7D%7D&description=%7B%7BDescription%7D%7D&btnPrimaryCaption=Email%20Me&btnPrimaryLink=mailto%3A%7B%7BEmail%7D%7D)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> How does this compare to sheet 2 site? Just wondering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Commented here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23761645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23761645)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Does this only work with public sheets?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now, yes. I'm hard at work building Google Sheets API integration so you won't have to make your sheet public.

<comment><USER42> But presumably, that is going to cost you $15k or whatever it is now to be an approved user of Google API?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so. I just need to procure an API key and some credentials from Cloud Console to begin using Sheet API. The rest is just a lot more backend development for me.

<comment><USER42> Right, but won't you need permissions to access data in user accounts? You can only get permissions with a Google audit (which you have to pay for).

<comment><USER43> No, the easiest way is to use a service account and share the sheet with the service account. No need for user OAuth at all.

[https://github.com/juampynr/google-spreadsheet- reader](https://github.com/juampynr/google-spreadsheet-reader)

<comment><USER42> Would you build a livelihood on that? I have heard of that but it sounds like the kind of loophole that got the industry into a situation where you needed to pay tens of thousands to use an API.

<comment><USER43> > Would you build a livelihood on that?

Yes? Google is notorious for deprecating and changing things, so I would have a backup plan but companies like Streak have built large businesses on much more restricted APIs like Gmail.

> kind of loophole

This is not a loophole, this is 2-legged Oauth. This is much safer than the typical 3-legged Oauth where the user gives blanket permission to read and write from their Google Drive. The user has to explicitly share the sheet with this service account email. Google is trying to protect people from clicking a phishing link and getting all their email and drive content stolen or hijacked.

Yes, Google can shut this down tomorrow or demand thousands of dollars to use it. It's a inherent risk building on top of someone's platform, the trade off being you get the scaffolding and user base the platform already has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> really cool. Love the idea.

</comment><comment><USER45> Well, sheeeet.

(might want to rethink naming)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's definitely crossed my mind (and others as well). But as long as it conveys the idea, I'm fine with it :)</comment></comment>


Fed reinstates multi-trillion dollar bailout program for Wall Street - jules-jules https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/03/fed-announces-program-for-wall-street-banks-to-pledge-plunging-stocks-to-get-trillions-in-loans-at-%C2%BC-percent-interest/ <comment><AUTHOR> Notably compared to the 2008 program, this time around they allow dealer banks to take out cash loans using... equities.. as collateral.

Dealer goes bust, market takes a huge hit, and the collateral value shrinks in correspondence to that hit. Madness. And still the markets have barely even sniffed at these announcements.

I expect before this is all over, POTUS will be making those daily coronavirus livestreams wearing fancy dress and cracking jokes just to keep people interested, because they've already spent every last drop of substance in the opening weeks of what promises to be a 6+ month journey.

<comment><USER2> BoJ has for a long time purchased equities (like the fed will sometimes buy treasuries and MBS.) ECB just announced this as well. Would you rather equities used as collateral or to have the fed purchase them? As collateral, it is an interesting statement of faith on their future value.

If you follow MMT, we could do away with the whole "loan" shenanigans and just print it and distribute directly.

<comment><USER3> If you print to buy equities, that's reasonable, as long as you're distributing the gains to citizens as UBI and not just buying to put a price floor on assets to maintain the wealth of a small subset of the country. So start buying up assets and fire up ACH transfers for citizens to get their dividends.

"Backstop America", not just the wealthy. That's the injustice people take issue with (and rightfully so). We've seen this before, we've seen how it played out, and the appetite for it to be repeated is likely not there.

<comment><USER4> The appetite for bank bailouts wasn't there in 2008 either, people took issue with how banks paid massive bonuses during that time. Still it happened. We're doomed to repeat the mistake again

<comment><USER5> Bank bailouts weren't the problem. Massive amount of fraud the banks allowed was the problem. They allowed people to borrow massive amounts of cash with little to no income. None of the senior execs were prosecuted.

<comment><USER3> To be clear, the fraud was banks packaging up subprime loans as prime and then dumping them on the secondary market to unsuspecting investors who thought they were getting quality mortgage bonds (I gloss over the nuance of tranches and CDOs for brevity).

This of course hurt homeowners who had loans made that never should've been made, but the root cause was investors not getting what they thought they were buying, and the resulting collapse in confidence. Homeowners were collateral damage, and as you mention, prosecutions were underwhelming (only 1 person was prosecuted).

<comment><USER6> I felt really bad about ordinary people that got clobberd and then just left to fend for themselves. Ordinary people don't buy houses as 'prudent investments'. They do it because that's where they are in life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article, as written, is untrue. From a very quick search, "Triple-A CLO paper eligible for the Fed's PDCF" [0] would be a better term. What is "Triple A CLO paper" you might ask? Well, it's any loan(s) made to a company with triple A credit. And there are only 2 US Companies with triple A credit, again according to my very quick search: Microsoft, and Johnson & Johnson [1]. So, it's not as if these banks have a bunch of bad junk debt they can just toss of into the fed, and they're certainly not funding hedge funds.

[0] - [https://www.globalcapital.com/article/b1kt9stqwx0q2q/triplea...](https://www.globalcapital.com/article/b1kt9stqwx0q2q/triplea- clo-paper-eligible-for-the-fed39s-pdcf)

[1] - [https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2011/what-do- aa-...](https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2011/what-do-aa-and-aaa- credit-ratings-mean-jnj-xom-adp-msft0809.aspx)

Edit:

Official source: [https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20200317b.htm)

<comment><USER8> _> What is "Triple A CLO paper" you might ask? Well, it's any loan(s) made to a company with triple A credit_

This is not exactly right. A CLO is a collateralized loan obligation. It's essentially a company that holds the loans of many other companies. Those companies may be highly or poorly rated.

The CLO finances it's loans by borrowing from investors (by issuing securities). The different securities take losses in different ways if the underlying loans go bad. One class of securities losses money as the loans go bad, then once they are wiped out, the next class takes losses and so on.

The last group to take losses is the triple-A CLO paper you referred to. It loses money only if >X% of the underlying loans in the company go bad, and thus is the most highly rated, assuming X is a sufficiently large number in relationship to the quality of the underlying loans.

Typical buyers of AAA CLO paper are insurance companies etc.

And yes, this is the very much like the structure that caused so much pain in the last crisis when it was filled with mortgages.

<comment><USER9> And to make things worse, the ratings were manipulated the last go around.

<comment><USER10> Is there sufficient reason to believe they haven't been for corporate bonds?

I've been reading about corporate bonds causing the next financial crisis since at least 2015.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I initially found the article's attitude against the Fed's noted actions surprising, but slowly a bias from the author surfaced, particularly after I started seeing phrases like "toxic waste" and "a secret from the American people". I am not saying Wall St. and/or/nor the Fed's actions (or lack thereof) were correct for the time (2008), but this seemingly personal vendetta does not make for a valuable, objective piece of journalism. The author even notes herself as "an outspoken critic" on the About page [1].

[1]: [https://wallstreetonparade.com/about-3/about/](https://wallstreetonparade.com/about-3/about/)

<comment><USER12> I don't believe objective journalism exists, unless you are somehow able to represent all 7 billion human perspectives. If you think you are not neutral, or if you have to think about to check if are harming anyone, then there is a high chance that you are the dominator/oppressor [1].

[1] [https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/imperialism.html](https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/imperialism.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I get that the government has to do something, but what sucks about these bailouts designed to help America out are all the people that this _won't_ help. It's the nature of the deal in this case.

Of course the executives at the banks and trade groups asking for these bailouts are trying to get the best possible deal for themselves, and once the money arrives those executives are the ones to decide how the compensation flows down the ladder - starting with themselves and shareholders.

No promise from these banks that "don't worry, all this money will trickle down and save us!" can be trusted. Honestly, I hope the US government remembers 2008 and doesn't just bend over to the banking industry to only have this same thing happen again in 10 years. It's such a ruse by the banking industry at this point.

I don't have an answer on what to do... that is something the American people need to push for. At least a starting point with figuring out the unknown is determining what not to do.

The government can't keep acting like trust fund parents to the banking industry and other industry lobbying groups to enable executives and shareholders to live in a world where business consequences don't affect them.

<comment><USER14> > what sucks about these bailouts designed to help America out are all the > people that this won't help.

Contrary to what you might think, this helps more people than just the banking industry. Without the banks giving out loans, your neighborhood McDonalds stops being able to hand out paychecks. Without incentive to do investments, your own company starts hoarding cash and laying off people just to survive. If a bank goes down -- not only does the bank and all of its employees suffer -- the banks are not prop shops: the money is owned by someone else. Your 401(k), your city's muni fund, pension fund, university endowment, etc., gone.

None of this is supposed to be a justification for trickle down economics, of course. Trickle down doesn't work. This is about saving what we have _right now_. An argument could be made that the banks are too big to fail, sure, but that doesn't change what needs to be saved, right now.

> I hope the US government remembers 2008 and doesn't just bend over to the > banking industry to only have this same thing happen again in 10 years.

These are very different times. 2008 is probably caused by the financial industry itself, sure. But this time around, the fundamentals is the problem: no matter how good the banks are, they're just not going to survive without help if the whole economy just shuts down for a year.

<comment><USER15> " This is about saving what we have right now. An argument could be made that the banks are too big to fail, sure, but that doesn't change what needs to be saved, right now."

This is exactly how it sounded in 2008. You have to throw money at the banks right now or the world will go under! No time for thinking.

<comment><USER14> > You have to throw money at the banks right now or the world will go under! > No time for thinking.

Yes, that's exactly what you do. You fix the imminent problem now, and then introduce legislative measures later. See Dodd-Frank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> meanwhile the SBA is currently loaning money at 3.7 percent under the Coronavirus disaster relief initiative. Must be nice to get an almost interest free loan as a large company while use little people have to pay through the nose.

<comment><USER17> I misread this comment; my bad.

<comment><USER18> You seem to be misreading the parent comment. It isn't complaining about small businesses getting loans, it's complaining about them having to pay a higher interest rate than large corporations. (Presumably the reasons for that are a combination of the corporations being "too big to fail" and their loans being collateralized.)

<comment><USER17> Yeah, you're right. I didn't think any sane person that's eligible for an SBA loan would be complaining about a 4% interest rate. Private unsecured small business loans run like 20%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And the ECB just announced more stimulus. The BoJ has gone further than anyone else by directly participating in the market by buying up japanese stocks for a few years now. The FED is probably signing up for a brokerage account at etrade right now.

For all the talk about capitalism, market economics and "something something bootstraps", the wealthy sure love being bailed out. But apparently, we are told it's for our benefit. Isn't that nice.

So is this the new normal? Continuous and neverending bailouts?

It was just 12 years ago that bernanke, paulson, etc justified the bailouts as once in a lifetime event. Are human lifetimes just 12 years now?

</comment><comment><USER20> We changed the url from [http://archive.fo/RlH0d](http://archive.fo/RlH0d) to the original source, as the site guidelines ask: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

<comment> jules-jules Sorry about that. I used an archive link to lessen traffic load on the original page, which operates without ads or other revenue streams. I will use the original source in future submissions.

<comment><USER20> Appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> got to socialize those loses!

</comment><comment><USER22> Turns out the Yang plan is a better idea, and might even be cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER23> Terrible move. They will still fail.

And then there will be no money to fund the FDIC.

<comment><USER12> There will be money, there will always be more money. That's the nature of national fiat money. Is it trust you are talking about, integrity?

<comment><USER24> Well, if they just start printing money to bail everybody out, at least we'll have a source of toilet paper.

<comment><USER2> Inflation happens when there is too much money in the economy. The total count of money isn't really a thing, it is the amount of money * the rate at which it changes hands. So, in order for there to be inflation you have to have the amount of "money*hands" grow faster than consumption. Since we are at a period of extreme illiquidity (money isn't moving around,) we can afford to add more money into the system. When the rate of money transfer picks up, you need to remove money from the system (raise interest rates.)

<comment><USER25> I can see two sources of inflation:

Moving the same stuff for more money.

Moving less stuff for the same amount of money.

It's seems like a bunch of free with supply side scarcity of the basics due to hording could cause inflation... Maybe?

I have hardly any background in economics, so feel free to point out the holes. These are just my thoughts after reading your comment.

<comment><USER2> The first is what inflation is. The second is what we call a retraction or recession, and we have plenty of those where the "price of money" (buying power and cost to borrow) does not change. The third thing (which you did not mention) is "stagflation", which is basically "moving less stuff for more money".

Being constrained on the supply side would indeed cause prices to rise, but this is not inflation. Inflation is where the entire supply/demand curve is shifted (because money itself is worth more or less.)

As an example -- in inflation, both your gold necklace and your toilette paper would go up in price. In supply constraint, only your tp would go up in price. The value of a dollar hasn't changed (as evidenced by the price to sell your necklace.)

I'm not an economist, but I make money gambling on options as a hobby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bailing companies out isn't capitalism.

</comment><comment><USER27> well, it is important that large financial business get to have an interest free loan.

</comment><comment><USER12> > the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) [...] the cash-for-trash facility, > where Wall Street's toxic waste from a decade of irresponsible trading and > lending, will be purged from the balance sheets of the Wall Street firms and > handed over to the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve

Yay let's subsidize Wall Street using public funds! "We can't afford universal healthcare", but we can totally - yet unnaturally - bail out (mostly rentier) capitalist businesses that have been reckless and parasitical.

Why not just let them die?

Has anyone watched the movie Margin Call?

<comment><USER9> The root issue you are describing never gets the public's attention during normal times. It's an emergency right now, so we have to do it, but look - fuck the average person, they don't give a fuck when things are fine. They don't vote on real issues, and when shit hits the fan, I honestly don't know anymore. It's a seriously undereducated and literally unconscious public. We'll forget about the underlying issues by summer.

<comment><USER28> Agree.

There was a Reddit thread a day or two ago asking something along the lines of, "How is this pandemic going to change the future forever?"

People had some really wild ideas about how the population at large was going to have these revelations about globalization, the economy, their expenditures, travel, caring about one another, UBI, social norms, voting habits...

I don't know if these people were too young to notice around 2008 or what, but my prediction is that people will be only too happy to be able to be served a cheeseburger and a beer in a restaurant or bar, where they will bitch about the past few months for a couple weeks before promptly forgetting any of it happened.

<comment><USER9> Right, like if you think society is going to ponder 'hey remember when our society went to shit because we all stopped going to restaurants for a month? Haha, weird, what a fragile economy/social system, wonder if we should figure that one out' - not gonna happpen.

<comment><USER29> This one's a bit interesting, because everybody is staying home. Disproportionately many people, who still have jobs waiting for them when this is over but aren't doing them right now, so right now they have time to organize.

That hasn't really happened since the internet has existed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Holdout - <AUTHOR> http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/holdout/ <comment><USER2> I had Tibor Gergley's "Great Big Book of bed time stories". There is a story in it called "Make way for the thruway" by Caroline Emerson. It is about an old lady who refuses to vacate her house so that they can make a highway. It has a happy ending when sympathetic construction workers build the road around her house, and she becomes the famous old lady with the pretty house next to the highway.

My favorite quote:

"You'll be paid for your land," said Mike.

"Money isn't everything in this world," said the little old lady.

Aww, heck, you guys deserve the whole paragraph:

"You'll be paid for your land," said Mike.

"Money isn't everything in this world," said the little old lady. ...

Next day, the Big Boss drove to the old house. "I'm sorry, ma'am," he said, "this house must come down."

"Young man," said the little old lady, "I've lived in this house for seventy years. I watched those trees grow. I planted that rose bush. I'm not leaving."

"But the thruway must go through," said the Big Boss. "People want the quickest, shortest way these days."

"What's their hurry?" asked the little old lady.

The Big Boss shook his head. he didn't know.

...

(After the diversion has been built)

"Oh, look at the roses!" people cry as they drive by. They slow down a little to look.

"Hum," says the little old lady to her cat, "they're not in such a hurry, after all."

<comment><USER3> Isn't it rather antisocial not to sell for public building? I don't understand why everybody sides with the holdouts.

Also I feel sorry for everybody who lives next to a highway.

<comment><USER4> Isn't it rather antisocial to pave over someone's home?

<comment><USER3> Not if you pay them accordingly. Moving is not that big a deal.

I am talking about projects for public benefit. Some things have to be built somewhere, after all.

<comment><USER5> "Not if you pay them accordingly."

And so it came to be, that money was the measure of everything.

I hate to border on strawman-building, but... what if I told you that you have to renounce your laptop, your telephone number, all your social media accounts, all your pictures, everything you've ever hold dear, right now, "for the good of the community"? Of course I'll pay you "accordingly" (up to a point, i.e. just enough to replace them). Would you take it?

For a lot of old people, relinquishing their homes means losing memories and likely being uprooted from the community they belong to, which is what they really care about. They don't care too much about their bank accounts, because they are aware that their time is short and what really matters for them is the connections they can still make, the history they can pass on.

That sort of thing doesn't have a price tag.

<comment><USER3> Well helping people has a price tag. If they don't care for the money, they could still accept it and donate it to cancer research or food donations for starving children.

It still seems selfish...

In any case what is the point of the discussion if I say "if they pay accordingly" and you say "but they won't"?

Money as a measure for everything - it is just a convenient proxy for talking about the value of things. What is so bad about that? Should these people be paid off in other things? Like what?

<comment><USER5> The point is that in some cases, there are things that cannot be "paid off", whatever the currency. Not everything can be bought and sold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My father (commercial real estate developer) has great stories about persuading people to not be the holdout. The most common objection is that they're older and moving is a major hassle, and the most usual way for resolving it is paying _way_ above "going rates" for the property.

Interestingly, property owners theoretically can collude against a developer by sharing knowledge that the last person to settle has the best chance of getting a great deal, but that very rarely happens. Instead, most rush to sell quickly. (For obvious reasons, commercial real estate developers very rarely decide "You know where I'm going to make a mall? On top of 25 families' dream homes!")

<comment><USER7> I remember a holdout situation in my old home town that was resolved... differently. The developer offered way above market rates to the last holdout, who still refused. A few weeks later, while the holdout was out shopping, the developer had a "miscommunication" with a construction subcontractor, who drove a bulldozer through the building.

Obviously, the homeowner sued the developer, but wound up only winning the normal market for the building. No longer having an emotional attachment to the empty lot, the owner then wound up selling the land to the developer as well, just to move on with life. Not counting some probably substantial legal fees, it actually came out cheaper for the developer than their earlier offer.

<comment><USER8> Sometimes the law seems incomprehensible. How is it that you can knock down somebody's house on purpose so you can essentially steal their land and all you have to do is pay for the house?

<comment><USER9> The difficulty would be in proving malice. If all you can prove is a bulldozer accident, then paying them the replacement value of the house seems reasonable.

<comment><USER8> And yet, I'm virtually certain that this would not apply to me personally.

Let's say that my neighbor has a window that I don't like, so I go smash it with a hammer. When questioned, I say, oops, sorry, I meant to smash _my_ window with a hammer! Just an honest mistake, officer! I was going to replace that window, but you know, got pointed the wrong way.

I'm certain that I would still get hauled off to jail at this point.

So, why the difference?

<comment><USER10> If (for whatever bizarre reason) your job is to go from place to place smashing a list of windows, then you might have a legitimate defence. No reasonable person could confuse their own house for that of a neighbour, but someone could reasonably enter the wrong house number into a database or misread a job sheet.

This sort of stuff happens all the time. A backhoe driver misreads a site plan and digs straight through a utility trench. A civil engineer miscalculates bearing capacity, puts a piling in the wrong place and causes an adjacent building to collapse. A debt collector mistypes a license plate number and the wrong car gets repossessed. People make honest mistakes at work that cause damage and inconvenience; No just system can treat that as criminal behaviour without evidence of malice. It's a tort of negligence, no more and no less.

<comment><USER8> OK, so let's expand the analogy a bit....

I don't smash your window with a hammer, but I hire a guy to do it for me. Afterwards, I claim it was a mixup, and that I meant to hire him to smash my window. After a long history of attempting to pay my neighbor to replace his window, and complaining about how much I dislike his window, and how I really really want it gone, would this not be sufficiently clear that this wasn't an accident?

Is "revenge by contractor" really a viable, punishment-free approach available to me? Can I break people's stuff with no consequences beyond paying for the items if I hire a professional to do it for me? I don't think it would work.

<comment><USER9> It depends on how much money your neighbor would want to spend on legal fees proving your malicious intent. You _are_ offering to replace the window, so there's not much more a civil court could demand of you.

<comment><USER8> Criminal proceedings don't generally require hiring private lawyers. It would be up to the local police and prosecutor to decide whether to investigate and bring charges. Which, again, I'm pretty sure they would.

If they wouldn't, I want to know this, because it would be really handy to have this sort of tool at my disposal. (And important to know that others have it at their disposal to potentially use against me!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A more recent photo of Edith Macefield's house:

[http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker- media/image/upload/18uugtoshe2...](http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker- media/image/upload/18uugtoshe2yyjpg.jpg)

Nice balloons. Won't quite lift the house up though.

<comment><USER12> On Google Maps

[https://email@example.com,-122.375384,3a,75y,6....](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-122.375384,3a,75y,6.7h,81.39t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1slB3jsbSE7 --QIoXnwwrU9g!2e0)

<comment><USER13> A quick "drive" around the neighbourhood confirms what I saw in the aerial picture in the article: what appears to be another holdout:

[https://email@example.com,-122.375932,3a,75y,14...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-122.375932,3a,75y,149.55h,85.47t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sJ4JifqT- Fi0peU_gQCR5aQ!2e0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've said it before, the 99percentinvisible podcast should be right up the alley of the hacker news crowd.

<comment><USER3> Would that lady qualify as a 99%er? After all she owned a house and was offered a lot of money for it.

<comment><USER15> Just so we're clear, the podcast isn't about 99%ers. It's about design, and it just happens to have "99%" in its name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's the Hess Triangle on Street View: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-74.00303,3a,75y,205....](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-74.00303,3a,75y,205.72h,75.6t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sFWs1ZuxiN96f8a7EcJGH2g!2e0!6m1!1e1)

</comment><comment><USER17> Stories like this sometimes just break my heart. When you are at a certain age, money just doesn't matter any longer.

Although the world can't just sit here and stop development and wait for people to move on. I am always so torn on how to feel about these types of situations.

<comment><USER18> I hope I never live up to that "certain age".

I mean, a lump sum of money, seriously exceeding a relocation cost, may have a lot of usages, from donating it to charity to traveling around the world to starting something new you wanted to do but did not have the resources.

Being locked in the amber of the memory of the days past and the ingrained routine may be a fine choice, but I hope to choose otherwise when the time comes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A flower shop that has long occupied a choice corner in my town recently made a unique deal with a developer wishing to build a large apartment building around it:

[http://registerguard.com/rg/opinion/31978793-78/everything-c...](http://registerguard.com/rg/opinion/31978793-78/everything- comes-up-roses-for-florist-developer.html.csp)

> Neal offered them a novel solution: He would design a building that included > commercial space for a new Eugene's Flower Home and give the family a deed > for that portion of the building.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think the house does a wonderful job of breaking up the monotony of the streetscape.

<comment><USER21> It used to break up the landscape, but in its current dilapidated state it's a bit of an eye-sore, even compared to the rest of the Ballard Blocks which are far from being architectural marvels.

Hopefully someone will fix it up, because as it is, it is less a memoir of a woman with a strong will than a monument to the futility of resisting change.

<comment><USER20> It'd be a great little coffee shop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Forgive me for making a somewhat philosophical tangent.

It has been said that naming things is fundamental to our abstract thinking. The ability to not only group some concepts together, but to give a single label to this group that is further composable, enables us to do more complex, more advanced things with those concepts.

To present a very clear example:

> _In China, (...) they call their holdout houses "nail houses."_

 _Finally_ I know what words to type into Google Images to find pictures of those.

<comment><USER23> TO loop this back around to the posted article, Seattle has a long and proud history of holdouts. Search for images of 'denny regrade' \- long ago Seattle removed an entire hill, leaving quite a few of those "nail houses" (well, temporarily).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like this restaurant on the corner of the Ballard Blocks was also a "holdout"...

[https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=47.662934,-122.375759&spn=0....](https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=47.662934,-122.375759&spn=0.40788,0.890579&cbll=47.662934,-122.375759&layer=c&panoid=Rtte1vzE4pXNHhUQpQdM-g&cbp=12,183.89,,0,-3.01&t=h&z=11)

</comment><comment><USER25> I remember when this was all happening with Edith. She was pretty much the only person in Ballard that didn't sell when offered.

<comment><USER26> She was _literally_ the only person who didn't sell when offered, that's why the Ballard blocks is built around her house.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Nomad List 2.0 – Find the best cities to live and work remotely - <AUTHOR> https://nomadlist.com/?v=2.0

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I launched the first version of this on HN 6 months ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222)

Nomad List indexes the best cities where you can go to live and work remotely. I started with 25 cities and 100 data points, and now have 500+ cities and 50,000+ data points. From cost of living and internet speed, to how safe and fun a city is.

I've also added 25,000+ places you can work (coffee shops, coworking spaces) and sleep (hostels and hotels). And it's integrated with my Slack group #nomads, which lets you meet other travelers in every city.</comment>


Cox claims it can reduce the lag in your PC games - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/cox-intros-elite-gamer-low-latency-service-140019277.html <comment><USER2> Gee, that's such a nice latency you've got on your game, there....

Sure would be a shame if anything were to happen to it....

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I curious to hear what people think about this but I might already know the answer :D</comment>


11 Toughest Cities to Book an Airbnb - <AUTHOR> https://blog.beyondpricing.com/11-toughest-cities-to-book-an-airbnb <comment><USER2> These charts always remind me of this graph - [https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)

As far as surprising places where AirBnB is hard to book - I'm surprised Boulder, CO isn't on the list. For as tech-heavy their city is, I recently went for a short consultancy there with a startup and found it nearly impossible to find any airbnbs anywhere. I think there were 3 with _some_ availability in the whole city.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just came back from Berlin, and was able to book an AirBnb during the high season of August in just a few days in advance. The price seemed reasonable for around $40 per night. I'm wondering if booking is as difficult as the author describes.

<comment><USER4> My wife and I had immense difficulty finding an Airbnb rental in Prenzlauer Berg/Mitte in late May/early June, and the number of properties on offer seemed greatly diminished compared to my prior four visits. However, my prior four visits were always off-season (October, Feb-April, April again, etc.).

Moreover, hosts told us that there have been recent regulatory changes and new registration requirements which seem to have had the effect of limiting supply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> SE Asia is one of the most difficult places to book a decent AriBnB in. Most of the apartments are just guesthouses in disguise, the hosts have no concept of quality accommodation (lacking basic things such as towels or sheets, overbooking houses, not cleaning up between guests), and displaying completely the wrong location on AirBnB's map. And this is unrelated to the pricing, as you can get a better daily price for the same quality of accommodation in most highly developed countries in the world.

To my surprise, AirBnB is very eager to send refunds for bad experience, instead of concentrating on removing the bad hosts and guaranteeing a minimum level of quality. I really hope that they will work harder on this, because if a first-time user tries their service in SE Asia, chances are that he or she will never consider them again. Booking and the like are far more reliable in that region.

</comment><comment><USER6> You would think AirBnB would get more involved in pricing (like Uber). Perhaps, though, it considers stable prices more community-friendly?

<comment><USER7> Curious what demand based adjustment you would suggest. It seems hard to do since people set their own rates

<comment><USER8> Financial incentives to new hosts when supply is constrained in a geographic region would be one idea (similar to surge pricing with Uber).

<comment><USER9> Airbnb only charge hosts 3%, so there isn't much they can do in that department.

<comment><USER10> I see a lot of Airbnb employees regurgitating this but it's not really true. Whether you nominally assign the fee to the guest or the host, it still comes out in the difference between what the guest was willing to pay and what the host receives. The total fee comes out closer to 10%.

<comment><USER9> That's a good point, but I'd assume most guests just compare the nightly rates on the search screen which don't include these fees (and also don't take into account weekly / monthly discounts).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Shortest day in sydney (mid-winter) is 10 hours.. Not at all "7 hours of daylight" this article claims.

</comment><comment><USER12> Fargo, ND</comment>


Shirky's Law and why (most) social software fails - <AUTHOR> http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=451 <comment><USER2> Another reason is that exponential growth on social networks works both ways.

One user who stops using a network decreases the value for everyone else, which makes other users more likely to stop, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> _simple, useful, and original. It's easy to come up with a task which is useful and original - just combine existing ideas in a new way, perhaps with some minor twists. But finding something that's also simple is hard._

Interesting

 _a single task that can't be reduced or explained in terms of existing tasks._

Simple things are often primitive (non-compound) in this way, but I doubt it's a requirement.

</comment><comment><USER4> Who here thought shirky's was shrinky's for a second

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm getting a little tired of this age old spin about how hackers can't make good and simple products.

They can and they do, look at all of YC...

Atleast hackers can push products out, biz people can't even do that!</comment>


Coding like it's 1999 - <AUTHOR> http://www.philipotoole.com/coding-like-its-1999/ <comment><USER2> I've been playing with microcontrollers for the last few weeks, where debugging typically involves reading data sheets more often than Googling, and I could definitely see myself integrating this type of workflow into my day job.</comment>


On the viability of consumer SaaS - <AUTHOR> Dear HN,
I have read many people strongly advice against working on consumer SaaS e.g. patio11. The main argument seems to be that companies are way more likely to open up their wallets than consumers. The other argument is that it is easier to get companies to pay up big amounts of money, so that you can get more profit from each customer. That makes marketing easier, because you need less people going through your funnel to get a reasonable amount of income. Finally, companies are less prone to churn. In spite of all of these issues, I am working away very hard at a consumer SaaS app.
Why I am working on a consumer SaaS app?
- I am building a product I want/need for myself, which turns out to be for consumers.
- I am very passionate about my product idea/industry. I could see myself dedicating the next decade or longer on working on this field/idea.
- I think know my market very well.
- I believe I have some good ideas to overcome the marketing hurdle.
What is my project/idea?
I am developing Koipun Reader (koipun.com). Koipun Reader guides you through consuming native materials in steps so that you can reach advanced Japanese.
My goal is to make a 100k a year salary for myself and work on an idea I love.
I dedicate around 50% of my time to Koipun, the rest of the time going to a project that actually pays the bills. Am I stupid to invest a massive time amount of time and energy on a consumer SaaS product? Should I instead work on some B2B idea? Is consumer SaaS viable? Any advice for me?
I am 29 years old and I am dedicating my heart and soul to this project.  Above all, I want to be independent while working on something I love. I can not bear the thought of not being my own boss and getting the freedom that comes with being an entrepreneur.
For more backstory checkout: https://www.koipun.com/blog/category/follow-the-koipun-story <comment><USER2> I have friends who are learning Japanese so I sent them an email with a link to your site. Hope some of them sign up.

I did a quick Google with "Learning Japanese" and "Learning Kanji" and could not find your site on the first page for either. You might want to consider buying some ad-words to steer potential users your way.

If you know your market well, then you would be aware of the many other sites that aim to teach Japanese. To be successful, you need to identify how you can differentiate your site and offer a more compelling USP. Easier said than done, unfortunately.

I can see that you are passionate. But I would suggest that you read "4 Steps to Epiphany" and peruse SteveBlank.com. You should be able to refine your business development by following his guidelines.

Good luck!</comment>


'Don't break the internet': Idiot's slogan stole your privacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/09/breaking_the_internet_no_property_no_privacy/ <comment><USER2> > the EU tentatively suggested rules based on the principle that people own > their own data, and this property right includes exclusivity ("the right to > be forgotten") – guess who was firing all guns against it? Facebook and > Google... At Davos, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said the EU proposal would > "break the internet".

> Young poses an interesting question. How could a network that was designed > to be so robust it could withstand a nuclear attack actually be so fragile > it "breaks" if one so much as breathes upon it?

Because Eric Schmidt is using a different definition of "break" than Young is using. In Schmidt's case, "break the internet" is actually defined as "break our ability to monetize your activities on the internet, thereby breaking our (Google's) revenue stream".</comment>


Show HN: A JS-scriptable graph theory experimentation tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blackhole89/graphicdepictions/ <comment><AUTHOR> Submission statement: I have previously tried submitting it to not much avail, but the program has matured a lot since then. The repository includes a number of examples (in examples/) that are representative of the current version, such as an implementation of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (screenshot: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blackhole89/graphicdepicti...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blackhole89/graphicdepictions/master/screenshots/boltzmann.png)). Apart from typesetting and layout work, the new ability to essentially associate arbitrary JavaScript objects with vertices and edges generally lends itself quite naturally to the local computation involved in many machine learning applications (as you can associate compute()-type functions with each vertex that read inputs and/or pass results to outputs).

<comment><USER2> Nice work! It looks really cool. The JS scripting is of particular interest to me, as I've recently been experimenting with sandboxing user scripts within a v8 vm instantiated from a go program, with v8 statically linked to the compiled go program executable.

I'm on mobile so I've only glanced at the code, but what was your experience like interacting with v8 from c++? Any tips, or dare I say, pointers for implementing v8 as a scripting engine?</comment></comment>